Escorted out by Ray Liotta

The timing of our move was pretty perfect as far as the TV season goes.

Since all the network shows stopped airing within the past couple weeks, our DVR was pristine by the time this past weekend rolled around. I managed to finish the season finale of Fringe on Friday night, and that was our last obstacle to a clean DVR. Something you never otherwise see in our house.

And so there would also be no obstacle to saying goodbye to the old house with a couple movies, one on Friday night and one on Saturday night, before we tore the equipment out of the wall on Sunday.

Ah, but what movies? What movies would best encapsulate the three years and three months we lived in this place? What best to encapsulate the house where we lived when our son was born? The house where we lived when, uh, we bought our first house?

How about Date Night and Wild Hogs?

You laugh, but I'm serious.

Our Netflix instant queue is chock full of movies we never want to watch right now. They all feel like homework of some kind. And we wanted to watch something light, but also something that had the possibility of being really good. Since we were pretty good with catching up on our 2011 comedies, that left the new releases in the Redbox machine largely lacking in palatable options.

So I swung by the library on Friday and selected a couple contenders. I started with a classic I knew my wife loved: Big. But then when it came to the other two, I developed sort of a theme: underappreciated comedies that we discovered while living in this house.

That's where Date Night and Wild Hogs come in.

Speaking of the birth of our son, we watched Date Night the day after we got home from the hospital. You'd think the sheer panic of parenting on our own for the first time would have sapped our senses of humor, but we just laughed and laughed at it. About a year before that we watched Wild Hogs on a random night in September. My wife was researching road trip movies for a script she was writing, so I brought it home from the library on a lark. We ended up really enjoying it.

What surprised me is that my wife opted for both choices over Big. It's not that she likes them better than Big, just that they ... felt right for the occasion.

We got a late start on Friday night, so we went with the shorter one, which was Date Night. So the cinematic classic Wild Hogs was left for the grand finale on Saturday night.

And sometime in the middle, I realized that these two movies both feature Ray Liotta.

It was certainly a coincidence. He has a sizable role as the primary antagonist in Wild Hogs, the menacing leader of a biker gang called the Del Fuegos. I definitely remembered that he was in it. But in Date Night he has about five minutes of screen time, playing a mob boss. 

Still, I thought it was funny that the comedies of Ray Liotta would be the way we would say farewell to our old house, cinematically speaking.

But kind of appropriate, right? I mean, Ray Liotta is consummately that guy who would show you the door. Or else he'd get one of his lackeys to do it. Either way, Ray Liotta wants you to get the fuck out of here.

Which we did yesterday. Last night, we slept in our new home for the first time.

For those of you seriously doubting our taste in comedies right about now, I should tell you that neither film tickled us the way it had the first time. But both did serve to remind us of some of the unexpected movie-watching joy we attained in the last place we lived before we owned a home.

Now, our first movie in the new place should definitely be ... The Money Pit.

I'm all out of love for "ogs" movies

I've made no secret of the fact that I enjoyed Wild Hogs.

You know, last year's mega-hit featuring John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy as middle-aged dudes trying to recapture their sense of adventure on a cross-country motorcycle trip? The one we all turned our nose up at, assuming only a moron could like it? The one whose trailer seemed to disqualify it from the very possibility of being liked?

Yep, that one. I liked it. I make no bones about it.

The fact that I even saw it in the first place was/is somewhat shocking to me, since I was not actually reviewing it. In fact, I brought it home from the library as a joke. My wife was trying to watch road movies as part of research for a road movie she's writing, and I told her I would look for some at the library. I thought bringing home Wild Hogs would get enough of a laugh to justify taking up a third of my allotted rental spots. (I also brought home The Motorcycle Diaries, which we had both already seen, and one other.) And then, lo and behold, we actually watched it.

What can I say, it was funny. Sure, it was also dumb in spots, but its overarching vibe was a good one. The closing credits themselves are worth the price of admission. One strident principle I have as a film critic is not to be ashamed of what movies worked for you. Just hold your head up high, give them their due, and move on.

The first thing most people said when they saw the poster for Old Dogs was "What is that, a sequel to Wild Hogs?"

It isn't, but it certainly could be. Not only does John Travolta reappear, but Old Dogs is also directed by Walt Becker, who directed Wild Hogs. This is no mere marketing accident. The producers of Old Dogs are certainly relying on the same crowds who helped that movie rake in a staggering $168 million. If the titles sound similar and the movie has one of the same stars, all the better.

Except this time, I really, truly, indubitably, absolutely CAN NOT imagine the movie being good.

You'd think I'd have learned from my Wild Hogs experience not to indict any movie -- ANY movie -- prematurely. It's the shining example of how you can't always judge a book by its cover.

But let me say this right now: If Old Dogs is good, I will eat my shoes.

Seeing the original poster for it was one thing. Wild Hogs may have made me judge Travolta less harshly, but I remain as skeptical as ever of Robin Williams -- even if I did enjoy him in Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad earlier this year.

But seeing the trailer? Oh, God. I didn't actually claw my eyes out, but it took some restraint.

The trailer is moronic from the first moment to the last, but the last is easily the most moronic. Seth Green -- seen earlier getting hit in the balls with a golf ball -- has gone into a gorilla enclosure at a zoo to help find Williams' kid. Naturally, he ends up being cradled by a gorilla, singing Air Supply's "All Out of Love." I say "naturally" because I have seen some variation of this joke in countless other movies, and it wasn't funny in any of them, either.

In fact, part of the reason I was inspired to write about this movie now, rather than waiting two weeks for the eve of its release, was that they just started using this image from the trailer as a new movie poster. I so desperately wanted to use this poster with this post that I had to go with the only one I could find online: the Russian version, written in Cyrllic. Suffice it to say that the one appearing on bus stops around town has the title in English.

So let's get this straight ... not only is the gorilla cradling Green the stupidest image from the trailer, but it got enough yuks from enough morons that they actually added it to the poster, just to remind the morons of the yuks they produced when they saw the trailer? (Ordinarily, I would have found an alternative to the word "moron" after the fourth or fifth reference, but no other word works nearly so well.)

To recap any of the other moronic details from the Old Dogs trailer would just make me want to claw my eyes out again. And really, I need them to see. I like seeing.

Is there a possibility that I could like Old Dogs? Yes, there is.

And since I don't want to actually eat my shoes, as I promised to do earlier, I guess my only choice is never to see Old Dogs. If I never see it, in my mind, it will always be terrible.

But I don't want to live my life any differently. Another policy I live by is to be willing to see any movie that has ever been made. If Old Dogs were playing on a plane, and I hadn't see it, and it wasn't a red-eye where I desperately needed some sleep, I would ordinarily watch it. Now I'll have to abstain.

The thing is, when you think about, only good things can come out of watching Old Dogs. If I hate it, well then, it gets the adrenaline of my hate juices flowing, and confirms my every suspicion about it. I get to feel superior and hold it up as an example of the decline of western civilization.

And if I like it ... well then, I'd be just as happy to have seen it as I'm happy to have seen Wild Hogs.

Here's hoping I'm not scheduled for any plane trips approximately three months after its release.